Cammie, Jean-Paul and Jake; Jake and Nathan

[x-courier.livejournal.com]

Cammie quite literally drags Jake to the mansion to apologize to Jean-Paul, who doesn't want to hear it. To make a bad day worse, Jake then runs into Nathan.



Cammie was dragging Jake down the hallways of the mansion by his ear. Her grip was anything but friendly even with the smile on her face. "I hope you rehearsed," she said, as they headed towards Jean-Paul's suite.

"Because if this doesn't sound sincere I am going to maul you in front of Jean-Paul, and not in the happy funtime sexy way. You've had e-fucking-nough of that, I think."

"How is it sincere if I've been rehearsing?" he muttered, then inhaled sharply as she twisted on his ear. "Ow!" Cammie had frog-marched him into the mansion, but had grabbed him by the ear when he'd tried to bolt at the bottom of the stairs. "I could just pull a skink and leave that in your hand, you know."

"I know, but ask yourself," she said coolly, "Do you really want to do that?" she stopped and knocked on Jean-Paul's door.

He wasn't sure if "Kinda" or "I can run faster than you" was the better response, but fortunately for his ear, the door opened before he could say either. He blinked. Maybe he should have rehearsed something, because he had absolutely no idea what to say to the speedster standing in the doorway.

They'd obviously caught Jean-Paul in the midst of preparations to go out; the speedster was in dress slacks and a shirt that wasn't quite buttoned up, a dark tie draped over one shoulder. His eyes narrowed at the sight of Cammie's companion and his obvious unwillingness to be there.

"À cause? Cammie, is it not early in the week for trash collection?"

"Never to early for that. Assmunch here has something to say to you," she said, pulling on Jake's ear. "So I thought I'd bring him by."

Jake swallowed, both at the words and at the sight of Jean-Paul getting dressed up. "I suppose I deserve that," he said quietly, dropping his eyes. "I just--I just wanted to apologize."

Jean-Paul gave the hold Cammie had on Jake's ear a pointed look, but at least looked Jake in the eye when he spoke next, though his gaze was ice. "No. You did not. I can only assume that you have no respect for my intelligence if you expect me to believe that, but I suppose that is fair, all things considered." Jean-Paul folded his arms over his chest. "You let me know in no uncertain terms that you feel no responsibility for my emotions in this, Jake. If you needed a boot in the ass to apologize for that after the time we spent together, then I am wasting my breath even scorning you." Jean-Paul looked back to Cammie, having dismissed Jake from his universe. "But I thank you for the attempt, mam'selle. It is, as they say, the thought that counts. I am on my way out for the night. Care to join me? I am sure we can find someplace that will serve Guatemalan Insanity Peppers as a main course."

Cammie let go of Jake's ear, "Sure. I need comfort food. I'm not dressed for anywhere fancy though."

Jean-Paul tossed his tie back into his suite and shut the door. "Neither am I. Come on; I know an Indian restaurant with a chef whose knowledge of spices could smelt lead in mortal stomachs." He offered Cammie his arm and the two headed for the stairs.

Jake watched them walk away in open-mouthed disbelief. It was like Geneva all over again--that sick, shameful sensation in the pit of his stomach, the feeling of failure bearing down on him, and through it all a current of doubt as to whether or not the whole thing had been a set up to hang him out to dry. A wave of conflicting emotions coursed through him--anger and hurt at being dismissed so easily, regret and guilt over the events that had led them to this moment, disappointment and betrayal and fear, all buried under the knowledge that once again, he had been measured and found wanting. As Jean-Paul and Cammie disappeared down the stairs, he spun on his heel and started walking in the other direction, wanting nothing more than to run and hide.

Even headed in the other direction, he needed to head downstairs at some point. Once he was back on the lower level, his path took him past one of the small sitting rooms that sometimes doubled as a one-on-one classroom. Surprisingly, given the time of year, it wasn't empty. Nathan sat in the armchair by the window, staring out a bit blankly at the grounds. Amelia had teleported him in from the boathouse for his daily checkup, and then Jack Leary had arrived early for their appointment and so he'd gotten Amelia to drop him up here for said appointment, given that there was a little off-hours work going on back at the boathouse office.

It hadn't been the most enjoyable session ever, but given the events of the summer he was getting used to it. A familiar set of thoughts approaching in the hall drew him out of his distracted brooding silence, and Nathan's head turned slowly towards the door, just as Jake appeared.

"Oh, Gavin," he said, before the younger man could vanish. "Mind stepping in here for a minute?"

Now it was Nathan's turn to get the Stare of Disbelief as Jake paused. "You have got to be fucking kidding me," he muttered before raising his voice. "I've already had my ass kicked once this weekend. Maybe next time."

Nathan didn't quite sigh. "I'm not going to kick your ass," he said. "I don't have the energy." Even in the bright light from the westward-facing windows, Nathan looked pale and weary, and the look in his gray eyes, while not precisely warm, was as far from baleful as it was possible to get.

"Yeah, well, I've been told how much of an idiot I am, too. So I'd prefer to skip the I'm Very Disappointed in You, Jacob lecture if we could." The fact that Nathan didn't seem to be angry was--well, it was weird, and it was kind of freaking him out.

"We're not precisely friends, Jacob," Nathan said, not quite dryly. Inwardly, his mind was working, however. Working busily away. Pondering how to frustrate expectations. "I think only those who are emotionally attached to you get to be disappointed in you. After all, they're the only ones who can use it as emotional blackmail, aren't they?"

"I guess," Jake said slowly, feeling more and more off-balance by the minute.

"And as for me, it was fun to have fun tormenting you when you were having fun, and Jean-Paul was having fun, and we were just a big bunch of happy fun-loving people... but right now it'd kind of feel like sadism."

Jake rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "Then why stop me?"

Nathan shrugged with one shoulder. "Because you walked by the door. And you're probably feeling like shit right now - especially if someone just got finished kicking your ass about this. And I'm getting old and soft, and can't help empathizing."

A part of Jake's brain was screaming that this was Cable, who had no reason to be nice to him and every reason to hate him. The other part insisted that maybe if he could explain it to Nathan, he could explain it to Jean-Paul, or Cammie, or whoever else showed up deciding to kick his ass. He dropped heavily into a chair by the door and gave Nathan a thoroughly bewildered look. "I just don't understand why everyone's treating this like I'd made some big commitment or something."

Was that it? Just a lack of understanding? There was a part of Nathan that still wanted to reach across the distance between them and smack the younger man upside the head, but that would be the easy reaction, and the unproductive one. "Is that what you think 'they're' doing?" he asked, instead.

He shrugged helplessly. "I'm certainly getting yelled at like that's the issue."

"But are they yelling at you because their interpretation differs from your interpretation, or because you hurt someone they care about?" Nathan shrugged. "It was your relationship... thing, not theirs."

Jake almost protested that it hadn't been a relationship, dammit, but Nathan's point about Jean-Paul being hurt gave him pause. "I don't know," he said in the tone of a kid who's been caught in a lie but isn't willing to admit it yet.

"Out of curiosity," Nathan said, gray eyes very steady, "why did you tell him what happened?"

"Because I was trying to do the right thing," Jake protested. "Because I liked him. I wish I hadn't told him--it certainly didn't help anything."

"I see," Nathan said. "The right thing, huh? You wanted to be honest with him..."

"You can skip over the whole 'the right thing would have been not sleeping with Wanda in the first place' part. I get that, and I can't really go back and change that," Jake said sullenly, rubbing at his mouth. "But yes. I wanted to be honest. Believe it or not, I actually tried really hard to be honest with Jean-Paul." In fact, there were times when he thought he'd been too honest with Jean-Paul, but he wasn't going to get into that with Nathan.

"Wanda, huh?" Nathan murmured, voice soft but dripping with sarcasm. "And here I thought some tart in London had waved an Eccles cake at you or something..." He went on before Jake could respond to that. "Where were we? Oh, right - you wanted to be honest with him. Always laudable. You couldn't have kept it from him if you were already feeling guilty..."

Jake shot him a dirty look. "I am good at keeping secrets when I need to."

"But you didn't want to, did you?" Come on, Gavin, you're not actually stupid, I do know that. Make the connection already. "I'm going to guess you felt obligated to tell him, or you wouldn't have. I've known you long enough to know that for you, avoidance is always preferable."

Jake looked away, glaring at the wall for a moment before he answered. "Yes. I felt obligated to tell him, because I cared. Which no one seems to believe."

"I believe you," Nathan said, his tone not quite deadpan. "Because I don't think you'd have willingly complicated your life with a sudden burst of honesty and straightforwardness if you didn't." He shifted in the chair, one hand pressed lightly to his side. "I just think you maybe... wandered into deeper waters than you understood."

"This is why I don't do relationships," Jake grumbled. "This is exactly what I wanted to avoid."

"Yet you got there anyway, didn't you?" All right, now he was bordering on the mildly sadistic. But he actually hadn't pulled Jake in here to pat him on the head and tell him everything was going to be okay. Nathan briefly entertained the mental image of Dom laughing herself into a coronary at the idea. "I suppose this is progress. You've admitted you were, uh, doing a relationship..."

Jake squirmed uncomfortably. "But we weren't. We talked about it, after...when we started sleeping together again. I told him I didn't--that I couldn't do anything serious."

"And yet, when you stepped outside the bounds of the relationship that didn't exist, you couldn't just carry on as if all you'd done was add a night with a friend to your preexisting arrangement of strings-free, emotionally neutral sex. No," Nathan said, very calmly but enjoying himself just a little, "you had to stop, and make a confession that you knew would throw all kinds of monkeywrenches into the works."

"What, you think I should have just not told him?" Jake asked, clearly perplexed.

"No," Nathan drawled. "I think that if you had actually been convinced that this was a casual thing with Jean-Paul, that it wasn't serious...you would never have felt you needed to tell him in the first place. I think something overrode your usual sterling sense of self-preservation."

"Would this be my inclination towards self-sabotage?" Jake asked bitterly. "Or has Xavier's once again instilled caring and compassion into my vocabulary?"

"Depends," Nathan said. "Do you want it to be your inclination towards self-sabotage? Because I'm sure you could brush it all off easily enough, if that's the explanation you choose." A hint of mockery infused his tone as he went on. "You had something good, you wrecked it because you didn't trust yourself to hold onto it...because it's in your nature to do that. Hell, once you work on it for a while, I don't doubt you could convince yourself that this was completely inevitable and thus, you shouldn't feel guilty after all."

The shapeshifter pushed himself up out of his chair. "Why am I even talking to you?" he asked irritably. "Of course you're going to take his side."

Nathan rolled his eyes. "Of course I'm taking his side," he said, forthrightly. "That goes without saying, and it's also completely irrelevant to the point I was making. Wait... actually, no, it's not." He leaned forward a little, steady gray eyes pinning Jake in place. "If I thought you were a horrible person capable of doing nothing but hurting my best friend, would I not be encouraging you to brush this all off and keep making a run for it? Instead of pointing out that it is a choice, and suggesting that maybe you might want to figure out why you wanted to be a better man here?" Even if you didn't quite manage it.

Jake stared back at him for a moment. "Because I liked him?"

"I would hope you liked him, given that you were sleeping with him. But I think what you're missing here is that whatever happened with Wanda, whether you should have done it or not, you at least respected Jean-Paul enough to tell him. And that, if nothing else, was an unselfish choice." Nathan tilted his head. "Or you could just call it self-sabotage," he said offhandedly. "Depends on where you want to go from here. And I don't even mean in relation to Jean-Paul."

Nathan's words made Jake feel vindicated and, yet, somehow worse. He sank back down into his chair wearily, rubbing at his eyes. "Tell him that. Because according to him, I haven't bothered to take his feelings into account or treat him with respect or...I was trying to make it better," he said brokenly. "Instead Cammie kicked my ass and Jean-Paul won't talk to me."

Kick the puppy, Nathan. Kick him hard. It's for his own good. "The problem is," he went on, calmly, "it came after you blew it. So basically, what you did was make sure you didn't make it any worse. Which is laudable, don't get me wrong..."

"This is not making it worse?" Jake laughed dryly. "Great."

"Oh, it could have been much worse," Nathan said, raising an eyebrow. "I think you've got sufficient imagination to figure out how. But the honesty doesn't make things better on its own, Jake. It just gives you the chance to do it."

"What am I supposed to do? I can't undo it, Jean-Paul won't even look at me, Cammie apparently can't be in the same room as me without wanting to kick my ass. How do I make this better without just leaving them alone?" Or leaving altogether hung unspoken between them.

"Well, I'd start by forgetting the phrase 'I was trying to do the right thing'," Nathan said after a moment. "Quit clinging to that, like you expected it to be an escape hatch from the situation."

"I don't--" Jake drew himself up, frustrated. "I think it should count for something."

"It does. It just doesn't count for as much as you thought it would." Nathan shrugged, smiling faintly. "I can pat you on the head for trying, if you want?"

"Shut up, Cable," he muttered. "Okay. Fine. I fucked up, one hundred percent. I feel bad about it. I would like to do the fucking responsible thing here and make it better, but Jean-Paul won't talk to me."

"When you're the one who fucks up, you wind up on the other person's timetable," Nathan said, still smiling that slight smile. "That said, you could always write him a letter."

"I guess," Jake said, although he didn't sound all that convinced.

"Oh, Gavin, for fuck's sake." There was a flash of mingled frustration, amusement, and something oddly sad in Nathan's eyes for a moment. "If something's real, it's always going to be hard. Do you really want to keep drifting through your life following shiny things and never getting too close?"

It was all too much. For the second time in several minutes, his parents' words were coming out of someone else's mouth. He was on his feet and headed for the door before he realized it, his frustration suddenly at a boil, needing to get away from everything--the near-pity on Cable's face, the mansion that made him care, the hurt and guilt and fear.

"Jake." Nathan's voice was soft. "You don't want to run away. You've already decided that. But the best way to learn how to stop is to start small."

He stopped, one foot already in the hallway, before spinning around, his hands at full, freaked-out flail. "Goddammit, would you just--stop being so fucking right?" He stopped himself then, before he could admit anything else.

"Mmm... no. I have a reputation for being annoying to uphold," Nathan said, then sighed, rubbing at his eyes. "Look, I know I've thrown a lot at you here. Maybe you should go. I've probably stuck my oar in enough for one day. I just... I actually do believe you." He sounded mildly surprised at himself. "That you want to do the right thing here, and that you do want to make things better. And I think you can. It's just going to be... tough going, all around."

He turned back around, although he didn't leave. Of all the things Nathan had said to him, this was the worst--this...faith in him, from Nathan fucking Dayspring--it was too much. "Don't. Don't set me up to fail again."

Nathan raised both eyebrows, suddenly understanding a little bit more about what was behind all of this. "We fail," he said. "We're human. It's getting back up and trying again that proves we're worthy of the people we love."

Yeah, well, some of us fail more than others. He didn't say it, though, couldn't--he was raw enough already without handing Nathan any more salt to pour in his wounds. "Did you want to say anything else?" he managed after a moment.

Nathan shook his head. "Like I said," he murmured, "I think I've thrown enough at you for one day." And he was badly in need of some painkillers, which meant that he needed to stop talking about sensitive topics.

"Okay. I'm...going to try to find a ride home, then." Cammie had insisted on driving, leaving him stranded here. Maybe Angelo would take him to the train station without asking too many questions. "I'll see you later."